Wait for me, and I'll come back!
Wait with all you've got!
Wait, when dreary yellow rains
Tell you, you should not.
Wait when snow is falling fast,
Wait when summer's hot,
Wait when yesterdays are past,
Others are forgot.
Wait, when from that far-off place,
Letters don't arrive.
Wait, when those with whom you wait
Doubt if I'm alive.

Wait for me, and I'll come back!
Wait in patience yet
When they tell you off by heart
That you should forget.
Even when my dearest ones
Say that I am lost,
Even when my friends give up,
Sit and count the cost,
Drink a glass of bitter wine
To the fallen friend -
Wait! And do not drink with them!
Wait until the end!

Wait for me and I'll come back,
Dodging every fate!
"What a bit of luck!" they'll say,
Those that did not wait.
They will never understand
How amidst the strife,
By your waiting for me, dear,
You had saved my life.
How I made it, we shall know,
Only you and I.
You alone knew how to wait -
We alone know why!

This weekend has seen some war programs on television and
it’s nice to see that part of our history remembered in documentaries. I know
as much about the Battle of Midway as anyone else alive, I think.It’s a battle where we ought to have lost it
and lost it big but we wound up winning, and winning really big. One of the
Japanese commanders would later refer to it as “the fruit of arrogance” and I
think he was right.

But there were a lot of men who died in that battle, a lot
of men who went to death willingly, and it seems to me that battle helped
define who other men would be and how they would fight that war. If Midway was
the fruit of arrogance for the Japanese it was a harvest of valor for the
American forces.It was scary brave to
risk our carriers, all of our carriers, all three of them, in a battle that
could have gone horribly wrong for us as well. But that was the defining moment
in that war; we could fight the Japanese on the sea and in the air and we could
win and win big.

All of this was set up by the Doolittle Raid which caused
the Japanese more heartache and pain than they should have allowed.The raid itself was paramount to tossing a
rock through the window of someone who just beat the hell out of you, but FDR
wanted to strike back in any way we could.Flying B-25’s off the deck on the carrier Hornet and sending Enterprise
out to protect this mission could have easily gone wrong for us. That is what
helped define how our service men would look at the war. We took just enough
bombs to drop on Tokyo and five other Japanese cities and they were stunned.
Six weeks after Pearl Harbor and there we are bombing their capital in broad
daylight. That took a lot of guts,
really.

The Japanese wasted a lot of time on that raid. They spend
countless hours looking for the secret air bases in China because where else
could those planes had come from? They captured some of the air crews and
didn’t believe a word about a carrier launch. At Midway they attacked the
carrier Yorktown but they thought the Yorktown had been sunk at the battle of
the Coral Sea.How many carriers did the
Americans have? If they were wrong about how many carriers the Americans had
once they could be again.They didn’t
figure we would work around the clock for three weeks to get that boat ready
for war again. But that too, helped define the war effort. The Yorktown went
into battle with welders and steelworkers still patching her up. That, too,
defined who would fight the war and the way it would be fought. Even those who
did not fight on the front lines took their service a step further.

When the Japanese fleet was sighted the American forces sent
a squadron of torpedo planes to attack. These were lumbering and slow planes
armed with torpedoes that either missed or misfired about ninety percent of the
time. All of the pilots of all of these planes knew that they were going into
what was certain death; the Japanese fleet was protected by the agile and
dangerous Zero, considered to be the best fighter aircraft in the war.Yet into the teeth of the battle they went.
Not a single torpedo got near a Japanese ship. Nearly all the men on this
flight were injured or killed. Yet they defined how this war would be fought
and their sacrifice lead to victory.

The fighter planes were low on fuel for having repelled the
attack and the flight decks of the Japanese carriers were full of planes being
rearmed for the attack on the American fleet. Out of the sky roared dive
bombers from the carriers Hornet and Enterprise. Down to the bottom of the
ocean did they send three of the four Japanese carriers. The next day we would
lose the Yorktown yet sink the last Japanese carrier in the attack. What should
have been another Japanese victory was instead one of the greatest sea
victories in human history.The Japanese
would not launch another naval offensive operation against the Americans.

The Battle of Midway was a lot more complicated than I wish
to convey here. There were broken codes and lucky accidents. There were miscommunications
and little things done right. There were the right people in the right place at
the right time of history yet this battle remains one of those in which many
young men put their lives on the line for their country without hesitation and
with the knowledge what they were doing was exceedingly dangerous.

In a time of electronic and computerized warfare we tend to
think of the days of hand released munitions and dogfights as relics from a different
age and perhaps they are.But there are
those still with us who fought in that age and now instead of warriors they are
old men, a stage of life they could not imagine so long ago.

These men redefined the world in which we live. They defined
what honor, valor, courage, and sacrifice might mean for a greater cause.
Freedom, in the eyes of these men, was not some vague concept but real and actual,
and it was worth killing for and it was worth dying for, and they did both.

The men and women who have served in our recent wars are not
seen in the same light was those who fought at Midway but I say they have earned
their place of honor next to those. They have bled real blood and shed real
tears. Their losses are no less. Their lives are no less scarred. Their bodies
no less maimed. Their service is as great as any ever and we should acknowledge
this before they are old and grey.

Today we should remember all who have served and in some way
honor that memory. We, as Americans have been defined by the courage of those
in uniform. How we treat these men and women, how we remember them, how we
honor them, will define us every bit as much.

Saturday, May 18, 2013

It’s hard for me to be around fire and not sit mesmerized by
the process.Fire is a verb not a noun
and I am willing to bet it is the single most important external process that
lifted human beings from the ranks of all the other animals into what they
were. Writing was the next step in that process so it’s natural that I have
fire and writing on my mind. But back to the fire…

The two massive logs will be the centerpiece for the fire
but there are also a couple of other largish pieces from the limb that fell off
the Oak. I had to cut that piece up into
three sections because the limb was twisty and bent at angles.Each one of those pieces was all I could get
into a wheelbarrow and on the evolutionary scale the wheelbarrow wasn’t a giant
step but I am damn glad to have one. But
even these three pieces, much smaller than the logs, won’t make a good fire at
all. There has to be a lot of little stuff to start the fire with, you know.

A while back the top of a tree broke and fell. It landed on
the tree next to it and all of this was far too large and far too high for me
to play with at all. Nature took its course and both trees died. I had to pull
the first off of the second before the corpse landed on the fence and therein lay
the small pieces of wood. The wheelbarrow and I made a few trips back and
forth, back and forth, and slowly I had enough small stuff to turn a flame into
a fire.

I’ve watched people burn out a box of matches trying to light
a piece of wood the size of a grown man’s arm and it never works. These same
people will toss a gallon of gas on pile of logs trying to ignite them when all
is need is patience and an understanding of fire itself. I stack a wheel barrow’s
worth of twigs and leaves and tiny branches in the middle of the burn pit where
all the big stuff is waiting.

One match. One tiny
flame.

The fire at the tip of the match has a lifespan of just a
few seconds. Clear, yellow, and tiny, the solid umbilical cord of the
matchstick cannot support life but for a heartbeat, maybe three. I edge the
flame towards some dry leaves on the end of a limb and suddenly there is smoke,
the first sign of life, light, and the leaves crackle as the water in them
turns to steam.The leaves wither quickly
and the flame must claw its way up to where there is a tangled mass of Spanish
Moss and twigs. It burrows hard and deep into the mass and a lesser Firesmith
might think this the end of the flame and reach for the box of matches. There is smoke, smoke and no fire. But I hear
tiny sounds inside, crackling and popping noises that tell me the flame is
beginning to digest the dry moss.It
emerges from this gray cocoon and now it wants sticks, not twigs. I have
prepared a double handful of sticks and lay them on the fire. Like water
through a sieve the flames pour upward and the sticks blacken while feeding the
fire. More sticks and more small stuff are placed directly on the flame, nearly
suffocating it, but there is heat now, not just fire, and that heat instantly
dries and prepares the food for digestion. The fire breaks through once again
and this time it wants to spread out and it takes its first awkward steps
upward and outward.

It’s mythical that the doctor has to spank a newborn so the
child will cry and therefore get its first breath but the process of fire can
be defined as independent when it begins to breathe on its own. There is a noise,
a buzz, a sound that a Firesmith can hear, when a fire begins to draw strength from
the air around it. The draft of air propels the fire upward, spreads heat
outward, and the fire curls and destroys smaller stuff at a small distance now,
and it nibbles on the larger wood like Lillith. The fire is on its own and I
can start dragging more stuff to it.

People gather at one site, pitch a few tents, and rest for a
while. It’s a good spot to stay so they build a hut or two, till some land, and
suddenly paths become well used and more people show up. The center of town
becomes crowded and people spread out to the edges of the village and a town
begins to be born. So it goes with a fire, too.The center becomes a chimney, almost, and the fire roars here.But it creeps along the edges of the firepit,
back alleys and side streets but all
contribute in some way to the fire. There is heat, real heat, hard heat, keep
your distance, Firesmith, heat, in that center. The logs burn from underneath
and the fire now roars. Anything I toss into the center is instantly
transformed into flame. This fire is now something beyond my control. My puny
little water hose cannot put this monster to grave. It will burn out on its
own, get out and run free, or it will starve to death. The true test of my skill lies not only in
bringing this thing to life but also how I control it when it cannot be. My
defenses must be true. My firebreak must contain this thing. My plan must work
or this one will walk away from me and then it will run.

The center of the fire burns away all but the biggest pieces
and the fire begins to ebb. Like the moment after passion between two lovers
the heat now is mostly underneath. It will smolder now and not burn. One of the logs is still in one long piece but
there are red coals all along it. There will be very little left when the sun
arises. I rake all the remains into the
center and there is smoke but no real fire. The one big piece sends a few
yellow fingers upward but they are just feeble attempts to rise from the ashy
grave. The fire is done.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Okay, there's a largish dead tree that has fallen in the back acre and it's right where I want to make a path. I need to make a path so when I want to check the fence, or just generally walk around where there is a three hundred year old Oak tree, I don't have to worry about waist high weeds or snakebite.

I'm still learning to use the iPhone camera so some of the shots are a bit out of focus. Oh, like the first one below. It's where I've axed the log off the stump. Stumps don't roll like that so it had to go.

So the next task is to get the log on rollers. See photo below

It takes some getting used to steering but once you get into a rhythm...

And there is always plenty of help here for me. See photo below for the supervision of this project.

And below is the log on the pile and the next shot is the other half I moved today and in the same way.

I have no idea how much this all weighed but I can tell you it's not hard at all to move them once you get the right tools. We human built the Pyramids and Stonehenge using little more than what you see here. All this talk and nonsense that we cannot do something because it's hard shows a lack of imagination.

Monday, May 6, 2013

If you ever think that wring might come from a sound mind
just take a look at who is doing the writing. And I’m not talking about someone
writing a thesis on how rocket science works or someone working on a cookbook
for recipes that are gluten free, but rather the writer that doesn’t seem to
have anywhere in particular that the writing is going but it is going. Shit.
That would be me.

I sat down to write and suddenly the words began to appear
in from of me, very much like they are appearing to you right now.This is not the product of careful planning
or some inner secret I believe the Universe has revealed to me but rather a
product of some psychosis, very much like someone who feels the urge to speak
to himself while in a crowded bus.I
once knew a man who would burst into song at fast food restaurants and scare
the hell out of people.But the sudden
and unexpected rendition of “Folsom Prison Blues” might lead someone, or
several someones, to think the song to be autobiographical in nature to the
current singer. Or they may, in point of fact, believe anyone who just starts
singing aloud at Krystal’s is indeed a little nuts.

Yet this does not address the fact there are people who eat
the alleged food at Krystal’s.Clearly,
were we to contrive to slowly poison someone fast food would be a great
start.The people standing in line,
waiting to be killed slowly, paying for it in fact, might find disturbing an
old Johnny Cash song being thrust upon them by someone clearly not inside the
bell curves of expected or silent behavior. Noisily intruding upon other people
is looked down upon more harshly than poisoning those same people, in that same
room.

But I digress.

Okay, but where does this man’s urge to sing begin? Does he
leave the house in the morning with the intent of breaking out his vocal cords
and freaking out the patrons of the slow poison cookers and High Fructose Corn
Syrup Addicts dispensers? Does it matter
what song? IS there a triggering device? Is there something about the smell of
salt, onions, and white sugar buns cooking that makes his mouth water and the
bass lines kick up?

How is this different than what I am doing right now?

I could write and never publish a word of it. I did write
for nearly a decade and never said a word to anyone about what I was doing or
why. The decision to speak about a hobby that requires a lot of time, a hell of
a lot of work, but produces very little in the real world is hard to explain.
The gardener who spends hours picking away at weeds in a rose plot has something
to show, something beautiful and tactile that he might show off, or at worst,
have a dead thorny bush with wilted
leaves and brown petals as a testament to a thumb less than emerald. But
writing might disappear forever, good or bad, it may be unheard and unseen.
Much more writing has been forgotten than will ever be remembered, you know.

Yet here I am.

I was drinking with a friend one night and he told me
writing was like fishing, but you don’t know what you’re trying to catch, you
don’t know how to catch it, you aren’t sure what bait to use, and you aren’t
sure if the line has a hook on it or now. But other than that, writing was
fairly simple.I was drunk so this all
sounded pretty good to me. Odd, that most people I know who write are also
drinkers and most people I know who fish also drink.

How many of you would never get up in front of a crowd of
people to sing unless you have a few in you? Karaoke is very loud way to tell
people you are far too drunk to be driving home. I watched a young woman belt
out “You Ought To Know” one night with the expertise of Adele after a Ben and
Jerry’s Binge. What ever happened to her had happened hard and deep and she
wasn’t afraid to say it aloud. You have to admire that sort of pain. Hell, it
sells records but not little square burgers, I think.

It’s odd. There she is, right there, in my mind, a snapshot
of a young woman stepping up to the mike, and she’s got this silly “Oh shit I
can’t believe I’m doing this in front of people” look and then it strikes, but
deep. The woman’s face changes and her eyes close. That’s when I stopped
shooting pool to watch. To hell with what she’s going to sound like, there’s
something there. When the screaming stopped the crowd cheered but I stood there
and watched her step away from the stage like she was leaving part of her soul
lying there dead and cold. What she took with her wrapped around her like smoke
coming off of ice, enveloping her and following her back to the mortals who
could never see it.

Take culture out of the picture and there is no difference
between some jilted half teen with a big voice carrying half the people in a
bar into another world and some half demented Cash fan freaking out minimum
wage purveyors of poison and their victims. Both get remembered here, and
passed onto you, and both had something to sing, and both had their reasons for
wanting to sing it. Value for this sort of thing is assigned arbitrarily and
with prejudiced ears and eyes. Switch them around and the man gets laughed off the
stage and the woman surprises the hell out of a lot of people in a very small
space.

This doesn’t explain why I wrote this. This doesn’t explain
why I put it out there for the ‘verse to see. I don’t have an explanation. Sometimes
I feel like I’m singing in a fast food joint and there’s someone out there
dying to put a tranquillizer dart in me and there are other times I feel like I’ve
walked off and left something for someone.

Saturday, May 4, 2013

When composting yard debris and household debris there ought
to be more natural stuff than manmade material.The stuff we humans make apparently doesn’t compost as well as, let’s
say, leaves. The process that transmogrifies paper into garden soil requires
that something out there, a grub or some bacteria, dine on the composted
material and leaves seem to do the best.I more or less emptied the compost pile to get my new garden online and
have been making additions to the old pile in hopes that I’ll have fresh garden
soil again by next Spring. With all the rain we’ve been getting I don’t doubt a
bit that I will be ready.

There have been more leaves this year than any other year I
remember here. This is one of the few years we haven’t been jammed up in severe
drought conditions, and maybe that’s it. But I have raked up enough leaves to get
the pile back to where I want it and now, after today, I’ve got another pile of
leaves and grass clippings that are getting as large as the compost pile
itself.

I’ve been saving all my paper waste from the office to feed
to the pile and the shredded stuff seems to go over well with the bio-fiends in
the compost pile. I tell you there are many creatures in that pile that we
would lock and load on in a hurry were they large enough.It’s a very odd sort of biosphere in there,
partly manmade and partly natural, and it’s the way the world ought to
work.I feed the earth what’s left over
from what the earth feeds me and from that the earth will feed me again.

Some people might freak out over termites living so close to
their house but I’ve discovered that termites love paper. Toads love termites,
too. When I turn the pile and then water it the toads will hunt the termites
and it’s like watching sea gulls fly in catching baitfish on the surface of the
sea. I thought at first I had disturbed the toads and they were running for
cover, but no, they’re feeding. Birds visit the pile and pick out insects,
which don’t help me at all, but what’s a few worms amongst friends? The
armadillos break in to steal egg shells but then again they too have some part
to play in this. I do not claim to know what part they play and I cannot understand
why they keep coming to steal egg shells from three large dogs, but hey, I’m
not here to understand everything. It’s enough I never throw away anything the
Earth can eat.

If you start composting you’ll be surprised at how quickly
something can dissolve but if you don’t turn the pile on a regular basis then
you’ll discover that something buried at the bottom of a pile of leaves will
remain in its present state for a very long time. Water doesn’t seep down to
the bottom as much as you’d think. The pile has to be turned so everyone gets
and, everyone gets water, and everyone decays. The pile has to be turned to the roots of
nearby trees will begin to eat away from the pile from the bottom and it gets
hard to turn with tree roots in there.

I made a few passes with the mower today and then raked up
all the stuff I had just ran over with the mower. It’s a mixture of grass,
leaves, weeds, and whatever has been in the yard since the last time I mowed. I’m
not a lawn person; I have three dogs and a yard. There are things in there I
won’t mention when you come over and eat tomatoes. Yes, you are quite welcome. But
mostly it’s stuff that has grown from the ground and fallen from trees.

I’ve cleared out some areas of the yard I have never cleared
out before and that accounts for some of the new stuff, but this year has been
a hell of a year for leaves. I mentioned that before but I wonder if there is
some cycle of leaf dropping we humans have missed? Could all the tree be on
this same leaf popping thing once every twelve years or is it I just noticed it
this year more than others? In the drought years I almost didn’t have enough
leaves to go around so that sounds much more reasonable but I’m going to start
keeping up with that, too.

I’ve never taken a census of the trees here. I know there
are two giant Oaks on my property and a third just outside it. I know there are
few pines tree and even fewer magnolia trees. Most ofthe Oak trees are fairly young and most of
those are water Oaks who do not have long life spans at all. Yet I have never
dragged a tree book out and checked to see who is who and how many I have.That might take a while but I think I might
give it a shot. I’ll just grid out the property and go through it one section
at a time and find out how many trees I have.

At least four big Oaks did not outlast me here.I lost two really nice ones and that hurt.
One was rather large but it wasn’t ever healthy. The fourth just plain broke in
half and hit the house. I think, however, there are a couple of dozen very
young trees that have only been here since I have.I may have to thin them out in places where
they are cramped or better yet replant them to better areas. I don’t know. I
will have to work this out.

I fought the lawn and the lawn won, once again. This is the
first time I’ve mowed this year and I’ll mow about once a week until October.
Stay tuned for more adventures in yardwork and composting!

Facebook Badge

Donate To The Dogfood Fund

About Me

The Non Disclaimer

My writing reflects the things I see, think, and experience, and those things in my past that have led me to be me. It is not always pretty, it is not always funny, and no one has ever made mention of my life as a Disney Movie. If sex, drugs, profanity, or a general irreverence for all things religious somehow offends you, well, there are other blogs which will satisfy your need for self assurance.